I should have predicted the extreme stress I would be under during these last 2 weeks of April and foresee that I would likely disappear off the face of the blogging world… Twelve final exams in two weeks is pure insanity. In undergrad, the max number of exams people tend to have are around 6 and usually those are spread out over two weeks. But twelve? It’s like they’re trying to destroy my adrenal glands.
So far I’ve survived week 1. We wrote 6 of those bad boys in 4 days. I like graphs so I plotted my perceived stress over the past week. It’s been very up and down as you can see. My scale goes from 1 – 10, 10 being the most stressed I could possibly be and 1 being, not stressed at all and quite relaxed.
I started the week off right. Did some yoga, bought groceries to last me the next two weeks. I even moved into Residence at school. I thought I would save precious hours of commute-time to and from school and turn those into last-minute cramming sessions in the mornings, and time to exercise in the evenings. This has virtually transformed my exam experience. Great idea! I had some very productive studying with friends and was feeling pretty good about myself on Saturday.
Then Sunday rolled around and the stress increased. The day before an exam is never a good time. Especially when the next day means the weekend is now over. When you have a weekend, there’s this sensation of having endless amounts of time to study. You tell yourself: “It’s okay, you have the WHOLE weekend.” But then when Sunday evening rolls around you’re suddenly thinking: “Whoa, weekend is OVER, the exam is TOMORROW…what happened!?” So by about Sunday I worked my way up to a 6.5 on the stress scale.
As you can see from the graph, my stress levels went up and down quite frequently. I can attribute the low stress levels to a few things:
Stress Outlets:
a) Yoga
b) Running on the treadmill at school
c) Tears. Yes, there have been tears. For the most part, I held my sh*t together this week but I had my moments.
d) The night before my scariest final, I will admit I dipped into an emergency store of Nutella and devoured a spoonful of chocolatey goodness like a junkie getting their fix of cocaine after staying clean for months.
e) A long list of vitamins, supplements, herbs and homeopathic remedies.
Nice things people did for me that made me feel better:
a) My wonderful sister brought me my favourite brown rice pasta that she makes. Enough to last me the week!
b) She came back later in the week with lasagna. As you can see, food helps me cope with stress.
c) Cecilia De Martino. How to describe the greatness of Cecilia De Martino? To sum it up, I’m pretty sure there are many people in my class who can attribute their passing courses to her study notes. She makes these amazing summaries and charts and shares them with everyone in the class. It amazes me that she finds time to make these notes consistently for almost EVERY class (we have a lot of them!), but it also pleases me that she willingly shares with all of us. Not everyone is willing to do this, but she gladly emailed me chart after chart, summary after summary this week and it’s made a tremendous difference.
d) My study group. These people are the ones keeping me sane most of the time. Sometimes they literally hold my hand and help me through tough times, and sometimes it’s just the fact that I know that they’re there that gets me through. Every one of us has taken turns leading the group to success at some point or another and no one ever gets left behind. These guys make studying more fun, more tolerable, and a lot more productive. Without them, I’d probably have spent the whole week alone in my room with my fingers covered in Nutella, tears down my face, and not getting very much done at all.
e) Sweet messages from my boyfriend. We live quite far from each other so I don’t get to see him as often as I would like to (probably a good thing during this marathon of finals), but throughout the day he often checks in on me to see how I’m doing, and constantly reminds me that I can totally do this and that I will succeed! I’m so grateful to have that kind of support 🙂
Basically throughout the week, despite the ridiculously high levels of stress, I managed to come down from them in the evenings. This was possible pretty much up until Wednesday evening when I, as well as everyone else in Third year, was cramming my face off for two exams. The scarier of the two was an Asian Medicine practical in which we were required to read a case, diagnose it in traditional chinese medicine terms, select an appropriate list of points used to treat the condition, justify why we were choosing them, then needle them on a partner. The amount of preparation required to succeed on this exam was so daunting and stressful that it literally led my stress levels to quite literally sky-rocket off the chart. I felt like every 10 minutes I suffered from mental turmoil that made me think I would fail… In the end, I nailed my diagnosis and my points and everything was fine.
The nice thing however was that the next day, today, is Good Friday and we have no exams. So I’m mostly focusing on recharging, I did some yoga in my room, and am getting as much sleep as humanly possible while I can. My dad will be visiting my sister and I for Easter so we’re both very excited to spend some time together as a family again. The next week will likely be just as draining, but I’m hoping to continue with the yoga and hoping everyone keeps being nice to me so I can continue to survive and push on to my internship in May!
commit to bliss 